Cardinal, (Citizen Saga, Book 2)

by Claire, Nicola

  The black market of Wánměi; a dirty, dangerous, backstabbing underworld to our perfect, pristine city-state.

  I couldn't think of a better place to be right now.

  "Then what are we waiting for?" I said, as Paul pulled the truck out into the flow of Wáikěiton traffic.

  Our location only fortifying my resolve. Lena's home ground. Blood would be shed for this betrayal. I would bathe the streets with my fury. I would soak the walls of the Ohrikee in red.

  And I would place Harjeet Kandiyar's head on a spike in Broadway. A warning to any who dared to threaten what was mine.

  Lena. My Lena. And now I knew, she was the one person who could make me change.

  She was the one person I was prepared to change for.

  Chapter 36

  A Gift?

  Lena

  I woke to birdsong. The sweet twittering of a Nightjar or a Swift. A gentle breeze making the fine hairs on my arms rise up, sending shockwaves of delight throughout my frame. The smells of orchid blooms wafted on the air. The low hum of a wakeful Wánměi drifted in the background.

  I rolled over, luxuriating in the thousand thread count sheets, feeling the weight of a feather eiderdown, the softness of the mattress beneath my body. The silk of the nightdress I'd worn to bed.

  "Time?" I said, my voice raspy, my throat uncomfortably dry.

  My stomach somersaulted.

  "Eleven forty-five a.m." Shiloh announced.

  I lay perfectly still. Not breathing. Not blinking. Nothing.

  "Where am I?"

  "The Ohrikee," came her oh so perfectly spoken reply.

  My heart thundered in my chest, adrenaline suffused my veins. Clammy sweat coated my upper lip, my forehead, and between my shoulder blades.

  I scrabbled to get out from beneath the suffocating weight of the duvet, the sheet wrapping around my legs and making me fall to the plush carpeted floor. I whimpered when I recognised the pattern. Crawling backwards, I only stopped when my spine hit the edge of the bed.

  My eyes took in my predicament. My prison. One I had known so very well for three long years.

  "No," I whispered, but Shiloh heard. She always hears.

  "Do you require assistance, Honourable Selena Carstairs?" The hairs that had so recently risen with delight at a fresh summer breeze, now rose again in absolute terror.

  I shook my head, my body already trembling.

  And the door to the bedroom opened.

  My brain, already taxed beyond any reasonable ability to function, tried futilely to work out why I was here. How I was here. What it actually meant. But one look at Wang Chao as he stood in the doorway, eyes scanning the room for me and then finding me hunched on the floor, and I knew I didn't have a hope of reasoning this out at all.

  I sucked in shallow breaths as he crossed the floor to get to me, and then bit down hard on my tongue when he wrapped his arms about my body and lifted me up off the floor.

  I tasted blood. My mind momentarily cleared at the sharp spike of pain I'd self inflicted. And I pushed out of his embrace and moved halfway across the large bed he'd brought me back to. The window was still open. I glanced out, then back just as quickly toward Wang Chao, to keep him in my line of sight.

  "Toétèi," he said softly. "It's all right. You're safe."

  "Why am I here?" I asked and he just frowned.

  "You're home, Selena. Where you belong."

  I shook my head, my attention drawn to the open window again. Birds dancing in the branches of the tree that stood outside. A tree I had climbed down on one occasion. And been caught by a Cardinal at the bottom. I'd found other ways to escape, but that tree right now seemed to taunt.

  "How did I get here?" I asked, my voice stronger, anger returning to drown out the fear.

  "I have searched and searched," Wang Chao said, standing from the end of the bed and starting to pace. "I have advertised and threatened and even offered reward. But they thwarted me at every corner. Then in my most desperate moment a saviour appeared. Asking for a price I had never thought I would pay.

  "But you are special," he added, a sheen of fanaticism leeching into his dark eyes. "You were promised to me." He shook his head, clenched his fists, and kept pacing. "The price in the end was minor. A compromise I can remedy in due course."

  "What have you done, Wang Chao?" I asked, unable to keep up with what he was saying, his words too frantic, too hurried, too raw with pent up emotion.

  "I have secured our future. Secured Wánměi's future. The time has come and with your return it is all falling into place."

  "What is falling into place?" I pushed. And pushed too far.

  "Enough! You need to dress. Tonight we celebrate. Tomorrow we get reacquainted. Thursday we will marry. And on Friday we start a new Wánměi." He crossed the space to reach the bed, still far enough away not to touch me.

  But tell that to my rapidly beating pulse. I stilled. A gazelle in the sights of a lion. But I had thought Harjeet Kandiyar the lion, not Wang Chao.

  Images of incense smoke and delectable sugary confectionery, and tea, so much tea, flickered before my eyes. Followed by Trent running across a rooftop, falling into a limp pile, and Isha brandishing a dart gun.

  The lion's teeth turned into the yellow of a snake's eyes.

  A breath of air escaped me as the world came into sharp focus.

  I lifted wide eyes up to Wang Chao, saw the unhealthy obsession, the possession he thought he had a right to claim.

  "What did you give Harjeet?" I asked.

  He blinked, his eyes too busy, until that moment, taking in my scantily clad form. I didn't cover up, although the urge to do so was compelling. I wanted him off centre. I needed to grasp whatever advantage I had left.

  "The D'awan?" he asked, reluctantly looking in my eyes instead of at my breasts.

  "What did he ask for me?"

  "Nothing you need ever concern yourself with," Wang Chao said dismissively. "Now get dressed."

  He didn't move, and suddenly covering myself up was impossible to ignore. I reached down and picked the sheet up off the bed, lifting it before me like a virginal maiden.

  "I don't have any clothes," I offered, and watched him turn on his heel and march across the room in a Cardinal step he'd long ago perfected.

  He pulled a dress from the wardrobe, rifled through a drawer and returned with underwear. I had no doubt it was all in my correct size.

  "Get dressed," he said holding the garments out to me.

  "I will," I said, holding his dark gaze, "only if you leave."

  "You are my wife," he countered, as if that was reason enough to stay.

  False reasoning.

  "Not until Thursday." Apparently.

  He smiled. "You wish to wait?"

  I searched his face, searched for something of the childhood friend I'd known. Aware his father had beaten and moulded this man in to who he was today. Nothing of the Wang Chao I had spent summers chasing in the gardens of Ohrikee was left.

  I should have been saddened. I should have been outraged. I should have been terrified.

  I felt nothing.

  I dropped the sheet and reached out for the dress he held, feeling the weight of the fabric as it slipped through my fingers onto the bed.

  Wang Chao licked his lips, clutching my underwear to his chest.

  "I'll need those," I pointed out, nodding towards the panties and bra.

  He shook his head.

  "Not until you take that off." He nodded towards my nightdress.

  For a moment I just sat there, trying to assimilate this new situation, this new threat. Trying to think of an out but continually failing. Returning here had featured in my nightmares, but I had never thought Wang Chao would take such a starring role. I was at a loss in how to combat this. How to turn this horrendous moment into a win.

  All my life I have looked for the escape, for the one thing that would give me the space I desperately needed in order to breathe. My father had tried to give it to
me. He gifted me the identity of Lena Carr and later my home in Wáikěiton. A place I could go and breathe freely, even though the streets were clogged and the buildings overflowing with people. He had taught me everything I needed to know in order to hide, and had given me the basics for making my own way in this constricted and controlled environment we called our city. Skills that I used to become financially independent. Not needing the Elite stipend, just a wing-suit, decoder and a laser light to survive.

  All of it felt so very far away as I faced off against a man I thought might be broken. A little mad. How did you fight insanity? It was different to corruption. Different again to the thirst for power. It was logical in the way death is. Desperately not wanted, but necessary in order for the world to continue to progress.

  Wang Chao honestly believed I was his. He believed I would comply, or if I didn't, that my resistance was irrelevant. He believed in a Wánměi clasped in the clutches of Shiloh. He believed in a world separated by artificial walls. A country contained. A nation suppressed.

  I didn't. Hell, I'm not sure many sane people would. But arguing the fact with this man before me was futile.

  I had to play the game General Chew-wen had started. The game Harjeet Kandiyar had complicated. The game Trent thought I was capable of winning. Not Wang Chao's game, but mine.

  "Shiloh," I said into the suspended air between us. "I wish to test."

  "Have you been a model Citizen today?" she dutifully replied.

  "No," I answered and Wang Chao frowned.

  "Please proceed to the bathroom," Shiloh announced. "Refusing to comply will result in Cardinal arrest."

  She sounded so normal. So like the Shiloh I had known. No buzz. No ominous out of line orders. No suggestion she could think at all for herself.

  It was strangely comforting. It reminded me of a Wánměi I had blindly accepted and not looked too closely at before. The old me welcomed that vision. The new me wondered why Shiloh was playing tricks.

  "Shiloh, ignore that request," Wang Chao demanded. "I'm not sure what you hope to achieve, Selena," he started, as Shiloh said, "Cannot comply."

  We both turned our faces to stare at the Shiloh unit mounted in the wall beside my bathroom. Maybe I'd underestimated her. She was ignoring a voice command from the Chief Overseer, clearly she was acting all of her own accord.

  "Please proceed to the bathroom to test," she requested in her High-Anglisc voice.

  "Stand down," Wang Chao ordered, storming across the room and forgetting his need to see me dress.

  "Cannot comply," the Shiloh unit responded. "Would you like to take your test?"

  "Negative," he answered. "Run system check."

  "Checking," she dutifully confirmed.

  Damn. And there went my distraction of a testing. A diagnostic command overrode everything in a Shiloh unit. At least, it had when Shiloh was just a household organiser and not an artificially intelligent power hungry machine.

  Wang Chao slowly turned towards me, my underwear still grasped in his tight fists.

  "Your Shiloh unit is malfunctioning," he announced. Unnecessarily I thought. No unit should have been able to ignore a command from the Chief Overseer. Even though voice imprinting was not normal for the masses, for General Chew-wen, and I was thinking his son and successor, it was par for the course. An extra, expensive layer of technological security.

  There wasn't a Shiloh in Wánměi Wang Chao shouldn't have been able to command.

  Which made his belief in a Shiloh controlled Wánměi so much easier to understand.

  "I will have it removed," he continued. "Had I known it was defective, I would never have placed it here as a gift."

  I stilled. His choice of words too close, too special. Too personal. Not his to use.

  "A gift?" I forced myself to say.

  He nodded stiffly. Noticed he was still holding my underwear, and then thrust them into my limp hands.

  "Be ready at six," he ordered, and then stormed from the room.

  I stood there, chilled to the bone in my too thin strappy nightdress. The sheer curtains at the window billowing in the increased breeze of another approaching thunderstorm. The crack of lightning distant on the air. Electricity humming, or it could have been the synapses firing, inside my head.

  I turned back and looked at the Shiloh unit, still blinking its status of a system check. I watched it for the next fifteen minutes, heart in my throat, breaths all but stilled inside my chest.

  When she announced, "Check complete," and the vid-screen indicated a faultless unit, I sucked in a deep breath and said, voice hesitant and way too hopeful, "Override, Lena Carr, 241386."

  Chapter 37

  And I Finally Allowed Myself To Smile

  Lena

  Thunder boomed right outside the window. I didn't move an inch.

  I stared at the silent Shiloh unit, watching the green light in the upper right hand corner remain steady for a full three seconds, and then blink the unit's readiness again.

  I let a slow breath of air out, and said, "Check blocks."

  "Checking," the unit replied in Shiloh's voice. Which now I knew was not Shiloh at all.

  My hand came up to my mouth, my fingers trembling, and then I was reaching out and touching one of the last gifts my father had ever given me.

  It was strange to be so connected to an inanimate object. One that resembled a part of our world that was increasingly bleak. But this Shiloh was never like those moving to control Wánměi. This Shiloh was special.

  "All blocks solid," my Shiloh announced.

  I moved back from the unit and sank to the edge of the bed, just watching it do nothing. A blinking green light to indicate its operational status, but no more. And yet I had never felt so at peace as I did right then.

  I closed my eyes, breathed through the knowledge of what I had to do, and then pushed up from the bed and searched the room for supplies. I found tweezers in the bathroom. Hardly useful as a weapon, but to pry the cover off my Shiloh and laboriously unscrew its housing, it would do. I set to work disconnecting the wires, isolating the programme inside, and pulled the unit out of its resting place after at least thirty minutes of sweat inducing effort.

  All the while expecting Wang Chao to return or a Cardinal to investigate the relatively small racket I had made. But the thunder covered my knocks and bangs, the lightning added a dazzling backdrop to my anxiety, and the rain kept a steady accompaniment to the rapid beat of my heart.

  A hole stared back at me in the wall, the unit, so compact to seem hardly useful, felt heavy in my hands. And then I was searching my old hiding places, seeing if they'd been discovered or tampered with. Finding all but one breached.

  I pushed the Shiloh unit into the space under the floor boards, and then worked the dresser back into place above, sealing it away until I was ready to escape these walls one last time.

  I crossed to the door to my room and surprisingly opened it. And then stared into the eyes of a drone.

  "Do you require assistance, Honourable Selena Carstairs?" Shiloh's voice said from the drone's speakers.

  "Yes. I require a new Shiloh unit. I've removed mine and sent it to the incinerator. Can you arrange a replacement, please?"

  I'd hoped it would be a Cardinal outside my door. A drone was more difficult to fool. A Shiloh controlled one an unknown threat I was willing to bet was impossible to trick. But I had no choice. I had to cover the fact I'd kept my Shiloh unit at all.

  "There has been no delivery from your rooms to the incinerator," she declared.

  "The Chief Overseer was dealing with it," I countered, a little too quickly. Knowing I was heading into deeper treacherous territory the more lies I spoke.

  A long drawn out moment followed, where the drone stood immobile outside my door as though no one was home. And then Shiloh announced, "A new unit is being prepared."

  I nodded and closed the door to my room, leaning back against it and breathing through my mouth until my heart rate decreased. The
n I crossed to the bathroom and took a long shower.

  By the time I came out, a new Shiloh resided in the hole I'd made in the wall. Its light blinked red.

  I spent a good portion of the day ignoring it, after the attempt to leave my bedroom and roam the halls was thwarted by my own personal drone outside my door. By six o'clock, having had luncheon delivered to my quarters mid-afternoon, I was stir-crazy and seriously contemplating climbing out my window and down the tree.

  Taking my chances on the Cardinals out in the Palace's grounds seemed like a good idea, until I spotted multiple pairs of red glowing eyes through the sheets of rain.

  A knock on my door just after six had me bounding over to open it, keen to leave my prison and see what I could discover of this new, even more ominous Ohrikee.

  Wang Chao stood outside, a bouquet of flowers in his hand, as though he was courting me.

  For a second, I didn't know how to respond.

  He stood awkwardly before me, dressed in a fine charcoal suit and red silk tie, his shoes polished to a high Cardinal shine. He clapped his heels together in Cardinal correctness, and a part of me ached for the boy he'd been, but no longer was.

  He handed the flowers off to the drone at the door, when it was evident I wouldn't reach for them.

  "Put these in a vase for the Honourable," he instructed, keeping his eyes on me the entire time. "You haven't changed," he said, directing the words to me.

  I looked down at the dress I'd donned that morning. The same one he'd handed to me on the bed.

  "I put the dress on," I argued.

  "That was your day-wear," he instructed. "This evening you should have dressed in a ball gown."

  I shook my head. I was never going to wear ball gowns again if I could help it.

  "Never mind," he said dismissively. "Tomorrow you shall have assistance with your wardrobe." As though I wasn't capable of choosing my own outfits anymore.

  I didn't voice my automatic caustic reply, just accepted his arm and let him lead me away down the hall. Minor rebellion was less important than escape. I needed to assess my environment to discover a way out.

  Wang Chao led me to an intimate dining setting in one of the smaller parlours. An exquisite table set for two which surprisingly eased my dread. Had I been expected to perform in front of Overseers tonight, I would have failed. The drugs Harjeet had used on me made my reactions slower, my thought processes disjointed. I knew I needed another day at least to recover. Avoiding the political battlefield of Wánměi a little longer seemed wise.